[8] His father owned a successful accountancy business and was director of the Woking Water and Gas Company, as well as being an active member of the Conservative Party and Primrose League.

[9] The family went on summer holidays to southern coastal towns such as Hythe, Sandgate, and Charmouth, with Mundy also spending time visiting relatives in Bardney, Lincolnshire.

[17] In March 1899 he sailed aboard the Caledonia to Bombay in British India, where he had secured an administrative job in a famine relief program based in the native state of Baroda.

[37] Christian missionaries pressured Mundy into overseeing a program of providing clothes for the native population, who often went naked; he thought this unnecessary, although designed a goat-skin apron for them to wear.

[42] The couple moved to an island on Lake Victoria, where they lived from February to June, although were subsequently arrested under the Distressed British Subjects Act; under this, they faced imprisoned for six months in Mombasa before deportation to Bombay, although this eventuality did not occur.

[43] In November, the couple married at Mombasa Registry Office; here, he first used the name of "Talbot Mundy", erroneously claiming to the son of Charles Chetwynd-Talbot, 20th Earl of Shrewsbury.

Revolving around an Egyptian regiment who are taught to play music by their English Sergeant-Instructor in the buildup to the Somaliland Campaign, it was initially published by Adventure in February 1912, before becoming the first of Mundy's publications to be republished in Britain, appearing in the March 1912 issue of George Newnes' The Grand Magazine.

[69] In August 1914, Adventure published "The Sword of Iskander", the first of Mundy's eight novelettes revolving around the character of Dick Anthony of Arran, a Scotsman battling the Russians in Iran, which ran until March 1915.

[73] "I remember sitting in the dark and seeing the throat of the Khyber Pass at sunset - gloomy, ominous, mysterious, lonely, haunted by the ghosts of murdered men and by the prowling outlaws who live by the rifle and shun the daylight.

The story revolves around a regiment of Sikhs fighting on the Western Front for the British Empire who are then captured by the Germans; transferred to a Turkish prisoner of war camp, they attempt to escape and return overland to India.

[80] Mundy felt that many reviewers had failed to understand the main reason for the book; he had meant it to represent a tribute to the Indian soldiers who had died fighting in Europe during World War I.

[84] In December 1918, Mundy and his wife had visited Indianapolis, there meeting with the team at Bobbs-Merrill, and it was here that he encountered Christian Science, a new religious movement founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the 19th century.

[83] Mundy agreed to become the president of The Anglo-American Society, a Christian Science group devoted to providing aid for Palestine, which had recently been conquered by the British from the Ottoman Empire.

[87] Spending time at the Christian Science White Mountains Camp in Tamworth, New Hampshire, it was there that he wrote The Eye of Zeitun; it included the four protagonists who had appeared in The Ivory Trail experiencing a new adventure in Armenia, and reflected Turkish persecution of the Armenian people.

[103] Mundy claimed that Jimgrim was based on a real individual, whose identity he refused to reveal, while later biographer Brian Taves has suggested that the character was heavily influenced by T. E.

"[122] He developed a close friendship with the groups' leader Katherine Tingley,[123] who invited him to live in her two-storey home, Wachere Crest, at the Theosophical community of Lomaland in San Diego.

[150] Taves later noted that these three works reflected Theosophy's "most direct influence upon Mundy's writing",[151] adding that in looking to Asia not only "for exoticism, but for wisdom and an alternative mode of living superior to Western habits", they "reinvigorated and revitalized fantasy-adventure literature".

[157] Mundy remained with the Roman Empire for a novel focusing on the final months of the Emperor Commodus; it was serialised as The Falling Star by Adventure in October 1926 and later published in book form by Hutchinson as Caesar Dies in 1934.

Mundy became the syndicate's secretary, while another key member of the group was General Abelardo L. Rodríguez, who was then Governor of Baja California, and they also secured investment from Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles.

[182] Mundy produced a series of short stories, novelettes, and novels about the Criminal Investigation Division of India, most of which featured either Larry O'Hara or Chullunder Ghose as their protagonist.

[193] In the following year, Mundy focused on magazine work, producing King of the World, which was serialised in Adventure from November 1930 to February 1931; it was later published in book form as Jimgrim.

[194] The story moved towards science fiction, and entailed Jimgrim battling an antagonist named Dorje, who has discovered the scientific secrets of Atlantis and is using them in an attempt to conquer the world.

[197] Mundy returned to the setting of Tibet for two of his final novels, The Thunder Dragon Gate and its sequel, Old Ugly Face, which featured the adventures of the American Tom Grange who combatted attempts by the Russian, Japanese, and German governments to seize control of the Himalayan kingdom.

[207] Amid the economic problems of the Great Depression, Mundy began seeking out alternative forms of income to supplement his writing, beginning to give occasional lectures.

[214] Mundy retained an interest in political developments in Europe, and was critical of both fascism and Marxism-Leninism,[215] characterising Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

[228] Taves stated that through his literature, Mundy was "engaged in a lifelong discourse on philosophy and religion", including Eastern ideas on subjects like karma and reincarnation which would later be popularised by the New Age Movement.

He was able to describe locales and foreign beliefs with a convincing touch of authenticity, combining knowledge from other books, popular legends, and his own travel writings and friendships with a vivid imagination, leaving the reader unable to discern what was fact and what was fiction."

[236] Biographer Brian Taves felt that Mundy exhibited feminist sympathies in his work, suggesting that Yasmini, the strong, independent Hindu character that he developed in 1914, was clear evidence of this.

[238] Taves noted that while Kipling's work is typically seen as the model for colonial literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Talbot offers "a significant counter-example", for he was writing "for the same readers and within a similar framework, [but] he was not only overtly anti-colonial but also championed Eastern philosophy and culture.

[251] Other science-fiction and fantasy writers who cited Mundy as an influence included Andre Norton,[252] Jeremy Lane, L. Sprague de Camp, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Daniel Easterman.